Sautéed, broiled, or roasted — it hardly matters. However you choose to cook your mushrooms [1], these moorish fungi are packed with flavour and nutrients. When you've foraged (either in the wild or in the grocery store) for your batch, there's one thing you may be wondering: how on earth do you store mushrooms to make sure they stay fresh? We have answers.

Mushrooms Should Be Stored at 40°F or Below

You should store perishable food items, such as mushrooms, in a clean refrigerator at 40°F [2] or 4°C, according to information from the FDA. If your fridge has a built-in thermostat, you should check the dial or screen regularly and adjust it as needed. On the other hand, you can use a kitchen thermometer to check the temperature.

Mushrooms Are Best Stored With a Damp Cloth

There's nothing worse than taking vegetables out of the fridge to realise they are old and dry. To combat this problem, keep your mushrooms in their original packageing or in a porous paper bag [3] and wrap a clean, damp cloth around the mushrooms before refrigerating them. "If you want to make your mushrooms last longer and stay fresh, this technique adds moisture to them," Gian Bohan, MSC, the cofounder of Shed [4], a plant-focussed food vendor, told POPSUGAR. They can last up to one week in the refrigerator using this method.

"Keeping mushrooms in plastic film might seem like a logical storage method, but you need to avoid it," Bohan said. "When the produce is wrapped too tightly, it can begin to sweat, which will impact its quality."

Never Freeze Fresh Mushrooms

Looking for a way to extend the shelf life of your mushrooms? While many types of food can be frozen and cooked at a later date, The Mushroom Council ("composed of fresh market producers or importers who average more than 500,000 pounds of mushrooms produced or imported annually," according to its website) doesn't recommend freezing raw mushrooms [5] because they won't stay fresh but says sautéed ones are fine to put in the freezer [6] for up to a month.